Guyana’s Waterways – By Dave Martins
Dave Martins
Stabroek News – Sunday 27 Jan 2019
Growing up in Guyana, or coming here to live, our waterways are part of your life. For me, growing up in West Demerara at Hague, in a house by the seaside, it was the rowdy Atlantic, a hundred yards away, and the long straight canal running from the village road, straight as an arrow, about a mile, past the train line, all the way to Hague Backdam where farmers planted rice and kept cattle.
Later, as we moved to live at Vreed-en-Hoop, travelling daily to school in town, it was the Demerara River, with the government ferry boats – Querriman; Lady Northcote; and the small, appropriately named, Hassar – where we would watch the few small cars on deck, with wooden chocks holding them in place. Surely they would be pitched into the sea when the Hassar rolled – and roll it did, but the chocks held. Continue reading
Commentary: Guyana: The Hinterland – By Dave Martins
I have to declare that in the midst of all the high-tech life we’re enmeshed in these days, right in the very heart of it, like sitting in an airport lounge in North America recently, my mind, seemingly on its own, will take charge of me, like a tap on the shoulder, and send me back to some crystal clear memory (I’ve mentioned some of them before) that ends up slowing me for a few minutes, literally not moving, reliving what once was, photographs of life in some reservoir somewhere, some of them very old, but all of them crystal clear and sometimes suggesting music.
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